Author: Ben Cathers
Co-Founder, Instantsocial.com

It sometimes boggles my mind seeing some of the social media campaigns out there. While many brands do it great (Starbucks, Jetblue, Dell, Pepsi all come to mind), there are also many campaigns that just simply are bad. Blank facebook pages. No twitter entries for two months. Customer service and sales questions left unanswered. No blog entries for 5 months – yet – the front page of the company’s website proudly displays buttons for “Facebook, Twitter and our Blog”.

Disaster. So here are some tips and reasons as to why your social media campaign is failing:

You haven’t updated the content in months
So you spent weeks/months “planning” the social side of a campaign. You decided to focus on Facebook and Twitter. You planned the first two weeks of content – even sprung for an agency to create a custom facebook page and a slick twitter background. And what happened? Everything looked great those first two weeks – the page was active – fans were liking the comments – followers were retweeting content. Then you lost momentum (the person in charge focused on other business activities). You lost your creativity – and now your social media profiles look more like a ghost town (giving off the image of “no one’s been here for months!”) and your campaign produces minimal results in the long run.

You have the wrong people managing your social media profiles
Maybe it was the intern from the summer. Maybe it was an AE for your agency. Maybe it was the online marketing consultant you hired. Either way, the people who manage your social media profiles are either 1. Busy focusing on non marketing items or 2. No longer with the company (your intern) or 3. not directly involved with your brand (the AE for the agency). Irregardless, if someone in your organization is not actually held accountable for monitoring your profiles (not just posting content), then you will one day come to your social media profiles and see months old unanswered questions on your profiles.

Do you really want to log onto your Facebook page and see a question from a prospective customer asking for someone from sales to contact them… and then you look into your CRM tool and notice that person never heard anything from your organization.. or that the person wasn’t even added as a potential lead? Treat monitoring your social media profiles as part of the sales process.

Your content is boring
So you decided that you don’t want your social media profiles to be full of outdated content. You decide updating 2-3x a week is important. Great! And now you’re wondering why nobody is retweeting or liking your content (which is one of the ways one can figure out a social media roi). It could be that the content simply isn’t interesting. Using your facebook/twitter pages just to reproduce press releases and company headlines from the “Corporate News” section of your website is boring. Same with sending out content that is not relevant to your audience (if you are a baseball bat company, are you really going to be sending our news stories about presidential elections in Argentina??)

Just because you posted content on a social media profile doesn’t mean the human audience is going to click on it. No one is going to say “oh wow, this is completely off topic and irrelevant to my interests, but since my favorite brand posted it on facebook I’m totally clicking it!”

There’s no incentive for a customer to connect with you
You splash the links to your social media profiles around all your homepage. Then when the website visitor clicks on one of your profiles, they wonder “why?” “Why should I allow this brand access to my social inbox?” “Why should I add an extra feed to my twitter account” “Why should I add this twitter handle to my twitter list”. Offer a reason for the visitor to do this. Run a contest. Offer a free item for customers. Select “customers of the month”. Do something that can’t be found on the website…. because otherwise – why are your customers connecting with you on social media?

In the bottom of your heart, you truly believe social media is a fad
Despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you still feel social media is a fad. Because of this, you look for every reason to cut resources. You look for a reason to not go to the page and monitor it. You want customer service agents to not be scanning your profiles for potential customer questions. Social media works by the amount of effort you put in – minimal effort will lead to minimal results.

You aren’t connected with your SEO strategy
You spend tens of thousands a month determing specific keywords, content and landing pages for specific phrase. Yet, when one comes to your facebook page, none of these keywords or content is there. Why do you feature different content/direction for your google visitors than your facebook visitors?

You haven’t determined a metric and a way to improve it
Pick a metric. Something. It could be number of fans on facebook. Number of followers on twitter. Number of retweets a week. Just pick something relevant to your business. Then start tracking it (something as simple as an excel spreadsheet with the data). Then each week make a report and send it out to the members of the social media team. Figure out ways to improve that number each week. If your metric is the amount of followers on twitter, start determining the average number who join each week – then figure out how to improve that number.

You don’t pay attention to your competitor’s social media profiles
They are providing you free advice on what your customers want on social media – you can see how they interact with their customers, what types of questions/comments are being asked, what type of content is being re-tweeted and what type of comment receives a “like” on Facebook. Spend 15-20 minutes a week reviewing your competitor’s profiles. Chart the average number of new fans/followers. Then figure out how you can increase your averages compared to your competitors.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 14th, 2010 at 5:20 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.